Meçhul: Singles & Rarities

Erkin Koray's impact on the use of the electric guitar in Turkish popular music has led him to be labelled the "Turkish Jimi Hendrix." This compilation includes a smattering of Koray songs from the 1970s, and nearly ever track is a killer.

It's pretty common for English-speaking critics to refer to Erkin Koray as the "Turkish Jimi Hendrix." Obviously, there are reasons this has caught on as the party line, but I want to be careful about picking apart the reasons the comparison is accurate, as well as the ways it's not. Direct comparisons between their music aren't much use. Hendrix was coming from a background in blues and R&B; Koray was a co-founder of Turkey's first (as far as we know) rock band in 1957, but from his home in Istanbul he didn't have to look too far to the east to find a host of interesting sounds to combine with rock'n'roll. I think the comparison, more than anything, ultimately has more to do with Koray's impact on the use of the electric guitar in Turkish popular music than it does with any similarity in their music.

And in that sense, the comparison holds some water. Koray's use of the guitar had a profound effect on the way the instrument's role was perceived by his fellow musicians. His use of effects and his deft playing were pioneering, and he was one of the first handful of musicians to actively push for the integration of Turkish folk sounds with rock and psychedelia, even going so far as to electrify the bağlama, a traditional Turkish stringed instrument. From 1965 to 1968, the national Turkish newspaper Hürriyet organized annual contests called Altin Mikrofon (Golden Microphone) with a set of simple rules that did much to create a distinctively Turkish style of rock: Contest entrants had to either compose new songs in Turkish or cover a traditional song, but the arrangements had to be in a rock style, played on Western electric instruments.

It's a strange, top-down way of creating a scene, but it worked, and Koray was among the many musicians whose music evolved through entering the contest. Sublime Frequencies' Me**çhul: Singles & Rarities compilation picks up a couple of years after his last Altin Mikrofon entry, after he'd really honed his style and come into his own as a composer and arranger. The title is a giveaway that there's little in the way of an organizing principle behind the set-- the compilers essentially chose a smattering of Koray songs from the 1970s that they really liked, with no eye toward telling a coherent story about his career. That said, they did pick very well, and nearly every track is a killer.

For a good glimpse of Koray's singular ethno-rock style, it's hard to beat 1970's "Gün Doğmuyor" ("No More Daybreak"). Koray's guitar part, accented by audibly snapping spring reverb is prettily melodic, but his softly sung vocal melody has hints of modal Turkish folk-- Koray clearly was feeling the influence of early progressive rock, too, and you can hear it in the dramatic double stops at the beginning of the refrain. The ethnic element grew stronger with time. On 1977's "Olmayınca Olmuyor", Koray's electrified bağlama has supplanted the guitar, and the music has a thrilling progressive folk thrust to it that still sounds strangely modern.

Some of it is a little more directly relatable to American and British rock. "Krallar" sounds a little like the Amboy Dukes' "Journey to the Center of the Mind", for example, but for each of those, there are two "Goca Dünya"'s, where Koray plays his guitar in a style directly influenced by traditional saz and bağlama players. In part thanks to the lasting effects of the Altin Mikrofon contest, exploring Turkish rock constantly reveals startling juxtapositions and unique sounds, and Koray's music is rich with such moments. If you're looking for an entry point into the world of Anatolian rock, he's an excellent place to start, and this compilation, so well-stocked with great songs and good playing, is good introduction, even if it doesn't approach his career systematically.